Dennis - You are fortunate that you have the leeway to play around with other systems, and I definitely know what you mean about the “issues” with Windows.
Alex - We have tried running the full version of Ignition (less the DB) on a thin client - it works on the one with larger memory (2GB/4GB) but not on the smaller (1GB/2GB) because of the lack of memory. Java itself takes up most of the memory requirements when running. Well worth it to always purchase the larger memory unit, because it’s less than $100 more and gives you much more flexibility.